You could say that one of our recent installations of a Fabric Light Box is making history…because it’s part of a special display at Carlow County Museum.

The display is in honour of St. Willibrord – the patron saint of Luxembourg, who journeyed there in the 7th century having first served for a number of years at a monastery in Carlow.

Our Fabric Light Box is a central component of the display. It houses a reproduction of a page from ‘The Calendar of Willibrord’ – one of the most famous and important manuscript books of the entire Middle Ages.

The Museum wanted to make sure this item would stand out from others, so they came to us. We supplied them with a single-sided edge-lit Light Box. It stands 1.5 metres high by 1 metre wide, and is 120mm deep.

The print itself is on a back-lit fabric. We also used a ‘theatre block’ reflective white fabric in the rear of the frame. This serves two purposes here:

It reflects the light out onto the printed fabric

It contains the light within the frame. As the frame is not sitting flush to the wall, light would otherwise ‘leak’ out around the back edges of the frame.

Our photograph shows the effect of the Light Box, as you can see how it grabs your attention much more than the other display boards.

And if you’re interested in medieval monastic history…the original ‘Calendar of Willibrord’, from which the page is reproduced, is now housed in the Bibliotheque National de France. It is the earliest calendar from the Anglo-Saxon Church, and it lists the feast days of the saints honoured in Willibrord’s community.

The page on display in Carlow County Museum is written in the saint’s own hand. It gives some details of his travels, and tells how he wrote this page in the year 728 AD. Incidentally, this is the earliest known use anywhere in the world of the term ‘Anno Domini (AD)’ for historical purposes. His signature on the page is also the oldest known dateable signature of an English person (St. Willibrord having first come to Carlow from his native England).

The display continues to run at Carlow County Museum, where admission is free.